Startup Systems
systems that power startups
Startup Systems
Pick a customer instead of an idea: “One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was that when you're starting a company, you often think you're picking an idea, but you're really picking a customer. It's actually pretty easy to change your idea, but it’s way harder to change the customer you're serving,” says Agrawal.
Superhuman
Ask culture and guess culture are vastly different in behavior and expectations. Here are some highlights:
Ask culture expectations
Ask culture expectations
- Ask for what you want, even if it seems out of reach or like a big unreasonable request
- Take care of your own needs, and others will take care of theirs
- It’s fine to make requests that people will probably say no to
- People
Jean Hsu • Ask vs Guess Culture
Eight marketing maxims
- Trust is worth more than attention.
- Helping people get to where they seek to go is more effective than hustling people to persuade them to go where you’re going.
- Choose your customers, choose your future.
- Tell ten people. If they don’t tell the others, make a better product.
- Creating the conditions for the word to spread is the
Eight marketing maxims
There are two types of founders.
Those who do lots of research, validate ideas, test many prototypes, and iteratively get to a product. This is a more technical and user-focused approach.
The other is where the product vision emerges fully-formed in the founder’s eye before it is brought to existence. Here, the founder zeroes in on their self... See more
Those who do lots of research, validate ideas, test many prototypes, and iteratively get to a product. This is a more technical and user-focused approach.
The other is where the product vision emerges fully-formed in the founder’s eye before it is brought to existence. Here, the founder zeroes in on their self... See more
sari azout • Things I'm Thinking About
It’s easy to be excited about what the company seems to do... to choose our path based on the public’s perception of the output. But once the company has more than one person in it, most of our day is about satisfying the customer, meeting supplier requirements and dancing with the tension of doing our jobs.
Often, we use the product we make as a... See more
Often, we use the product we make as a... See more
Product and Process
Replacing bad systems with bad systems
seths.blog
The network effect is sticky and hard to overcome, and as we move the internet of things from our phones to just about everything we touch, it’s worth thinking about resilience, flexibility and the reason we need something in the first place.
Often, we end up compromising about our compromises, maximizing for the wrong outcomes and getting hooked on a new system that forgot what the original system was even for.
When a system is new, few are watching, so a handful of people with intent can design it and optimize it. As it gains in scale and impact, it calcifies at the same time that new tech arrives to codify the decisions that were made when the conditions were very different.
"A startup is a permissionless way to improve society"